


Edits and Ommissions

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Humor, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-01-07
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-29 03:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/315252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a whim, I wrote "Lucky" as an experiment in approaching Varric in a new way.  What I discovered was that he and Marian had amazing chemistry.  They wouldn't leave me alone!  So, over the next few months I found more scenes flowing out of something I never dreamed would be much of anything.  Now they bring me a special kind of joy.  So, I've collected the scenes here, and will most likely add new pieces over time.  It's not a full story, in the traditional sense, but piled together these moments show our storyteller and our champion paying tribute to each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lucky

“I can’t do this any more.  What will people think?”  A warm chuckle drifts down from him like little charred bits of silk.

Marian lifts her head from the pile of hides and dingy, embroidered sheets and gives the dwarf a wink.  Because she knows it will get him every time.

“They will think that you’re the luckiest creature in Kirkwall.”  She twirls and yanks the laces criss-crossing the pale expanse between her breasts.  There’s no need to tug it open.  The shirt is an afterthought anyway, a nod to the kind of modesty one adheres to at the Man.  Varric puts the book down, setting aside his plume, and rubs the bridge of his nose.  Ink smudges just across the bump.

“I used to think so.  Before the Deep Roads, and before Bartrand.” He tucks a broad hand behind her head and the champion glares up at him past the lamplit thatch of chest hair, and the spectacles nobody knows about but her.  “Before you I thought I was the luckiest son of a nug-humper who ever strutted around this city.”

“And now?” Her eyes admonish him, giving him a look that says she’s concerned about the ‘but’ . . .but she’s not worried.  A Tethras tale always makes you feel like even the bad parts, the hard-to-swallow and the I-can’t-look parts, are what make the whole of it worth reading.  And she wants to read it all.  Or, ideally, have him read it to her, have his voice in her ear at the end of the day, following her down to where things are a little easier.

“Kirkwall’s too small.”  He collapses the spectacles and drops them onto her chest.  “Since you came along I think I’m the luckiest creature in all of Thedas. . .and in all of the great, black beyond.”

She’s smiling, reaching for him, before he’s even done speaking.


	2. Quills

She’s captured all the pencils, and every remaining quill he has managed to squirrel away in his room.  The sodding woman has them tucked in a clip, high at the crown of her head.  To him, she looks like some chasind’s crazy wet-dream; all darkness and chewed-up feathers . . .pointy bits and leather.  Varric would be supremely annoyed if not for the fact that Hawke, in her careless way, manages to be both ridiculous and gorgeous.

“Give them back and I promise to go easy on you.”  He takes a step toward her, meaning to snatch them from her head somehow, and mentally counts on a speed he’s not sure he has anymore.

“I happen to be quite taken with my new accessory.  Izzy will be so jealous.”

She takes the big table in a leap, and stands up among the old stew bowls, and the overturned tankards, and the chapters that won’t finish themselves . . .and she flings an arm behind her head, posing like whatever’s on special at the Rose. 

“You will not have them.  Not without some effort.”  There’s that wink again, and her voice is clear and edgy as quartz.  The sound of taunting has never been his thing, but damn if she wasn’t always making him re-write everything.  Every time.

Varric forgets the quills.  He puts his palms on the table, gazes up at her, and forgets anything but the patches at her knees, and the belts swerving around her hips.

“I spend all day chasing you around Kirkwall.  I’m not going to do it in my own room.”  He slides a hand to the back of her calf, and teases the hollow of her knee.  “Come down from there.”

He’s got her.  Fun is fun and the dwarf is nothing if not game.  But he can pitch his voice as convincingly as she can.  The champion slinks down to sit at the edge of the table.

“Very well.  I’d say you’re no fun.  But we both know that’s not true.”  She reaches up to remove the collection of feathers from her head and Varric takes her hand.  He kisses it, nuzzling the scabbed knuckles.

“Leave them.  For now.”

Hawke smiles.  She wins even when she loses, he thinks, and it’s a skill he’d give his left nut to possess.  He settles for the smile itself, and captures her mouth with his.

Varric lets her pull him in with her long legs, lets her do whatever she likes.  Starting with pushing his tunic apart and ending, some breathless minutes later, with her tongue in his mouth and her fingers wrapped around him.  She doesn’t even bother to pull his trousers down once they’re open.  From that point, Varric takes what little control he can get, and Hawke lets him.  The dwarf groans into her mouth. 

“Hawke.”

There’s always a scary moment for him, when his hands slip past every piece of armor to find her ready and gasping, that Varric knows he would gladly tell her any secret thing she asked of him.  What troubles him is how, more and more, he doesn’t want to push that feeling away.

She bites his lip, dragging, and slips to the floor in front of him.  He cups her face, and memorizes her there amid discarded pages and broken bolt-tips.  The silly quills are still in her hair . . .and _stones_ do they tickle.


	3. Poesie

“What you’re doing there, that’s poetry.”

Hawke looks up from the table where her dagger completes carving the first half of _there once was a girl from Nevarra_. . .tongue still poking into the corner of her mouth.  She’s not sorry about the graffiti.  Casting her eyes over the red bird on the wall, she’s actually a little chuffed that she managed to carve in straight lines.  They had argued over what qualified as poetry, Hawke taking the stance that any old rhyme slapped together couldn’t pass as art.  When Varric shook his head at her snobbery and left the room to give Norah his supper order, the rogue took a moment to scratch out her rebuttal on his prized antique.

“So you say.  Shall I finish it then?  Maybe I should add an illustration.”  She blows gently on the wood shavings, brushing them away with the side of her hand.  The dagger dances across the backs of her knuckles, and she passes a lazy smile up to the dwarf. “A good piece of poetry deserves some beautiful art.”

He snatches the blade as it makes an arc toward the table.

“Let’s not.”  His voice crawls low into the warning, but he drops a kiss on her head, and continues to make the dagger move across his own fingers.  “You know I dabbled in poetry.  Nothing as good as what you’ve got going there.”

Thick fingers waggle over the limerick.

“Do tell!  Was it romantic?  I bet there were naughty bits masquerading as flowers and waterfalls.” She swings her leg over the bench and pulls him close, but Varric stops playing with the blade and glowers at her.

“As a matter of fact I was _celebrated_.”  When he tries to move away, she slides her hands into his coat, around his waist, and squeezes his bum.  At that, his voice trips a little in its defense of his poetry.  “I once gave a wedding toast that was so well-crafted, so loved, that it became the most popular thing recited at every party that year.”

By the time he’s done explaining she’s got her nose pressed to his chest.  And she nods up at him with the kind half-smiling, false adoration that drives him batty, even as she makes a path of warm kisses straight to his belt.

“Go on, then.”  Hawke stifles a laugh between nips at the flesh of his belly, the dwarf’s enormous buckle brushing her cheek. “Let’s hear this enchanting poesie.”

“You asked for it.  Hold onto your knickers, Lady Hawke.”  He takes her shoulders and drags her away from the table.  She cackles uproariously as he shoves her toward the bed.  They clamber up together, and Varric settles himself on top, thighs hugging her ribs.  When she reaches for him, he traps her hands gently.

“Florian tells how, at Andraste’s wedding-feast, the water-pots poured wine in such amount, that by his sober count, there were a hundred gallons at the least.”  The lyrical smoke in his voice captures her attention, and Hawke lets him press his thumbs into her palms. 

“So it’s to be a religious experience?  I prefer the . . .worldly.”  She bumps him a little, and his eyebrows dig a little lower in his face, admonishing.

“It’s not a homily or anything.  I simply used the miracle at Andraste’s wedding as a. . .”

“I get it, you ponce.” Pulling her hands back, she levels him with an icy glare before sticking her tongue out at him.  Varric drags a heavy hand across his face, and then cradles Hawke’s cheeks with a patient kind of menace.

“It made no earthly sense, unless to show, how whatsoever love elects to bless, brims to a sweet excess. . .” As he pulls each word from memory, setting them to burn with the ember of his voice, Varric takes her hands again and lays a kiss inside each. “That can without depletion overflow.”

“Oh. . .my.”  This time it isn’t false anything that has Hawke beaming her appreciation at him.  The dwarf leans into the juncture of her neck and shoulder and continues to thrill her with his voice against her skin.

“Which is to say that what love sees is true; that the world’s fullness is not made but found.”  He continues with a kiss, and a proud nose nuzzling behind her earlobe.  “Life hungers to abound,” he breathes, sliding his hands over her breasts, behind her head, to tangle in her hair, “and pour its plenty out for such as you.”

Hawke captures his mouth, or maybe the dwarf devours her first, neither willing to stand for any more teasing.  Despite the way he covers her with his groans, Varric meets the rogue’s urgency with reserve.  He teases her tongue, skittering away, and pulls back as Hawke drops to the bed in frustration.

“Poetry.  Gets ‘em every time.”  His arms spread wide before crossing triumphantly over his chest.  But Hawke only stares at him, breath coming too shallow to hide. The moment stretches taut over the mutual challenge in their eyes.  Varric’s cocky assurance coming up roughly against the shrewd assessment in Hawke’s blue gaze.  Finally, the rogue bucks, shoving him to the side, and pins him flat beneath her.

 “That’s incredibly romantic for a poem about a man who betrays a prophet.”  She moves her hips lightly on him, watching his jaw jump.

“What can I say?  You try competing with the Maker for the love of your wife.”  From his position, Varric manages to lick the expanse of Hawke’s throat until she makes a soft sound.  The rogue sits back, fighting not to ruin things and knowing she will anyway.  She looks down at the ring sliding back over his chest, hooking a lazy finger through it.  Her voice is clouded, not accusing, but sad in its knowledge.

“You didn’t write it.”

The bliss of the moment fractures along the downsweep of Varric’s mouth.  Hawke wants him to hide the regret spiking in his eyes, to feign some portion of caprice or merriment.  What he does, instead, is look away, preferring to watch his own hands move on her thighs until they mount the generous flare of her hips, broad thumbs meeting at the span of her belly.  She covers his hands with hers, squeezing, and rocks against him.  Varric nods, then shakes his head and finally looks up at her plainly.

“No.  I didn’t write it.”  The voice grips her as surely as the hands guiding her into a rhythm. “But it sounds better on my tongue than it ever did on his.”

For this, she has no rebuttal.  There are secretive, clever things between them, and one day Varric will be pained know exactly how well she sees past all of it.  Under the press of his fingers, though, and the beauty of his voice, Hawke decides that poetry is anything he says it is . . .as long as he says it to her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the poem in this drabble is excerpted and adapted from “Wedding Toast” by Richard Wilbur. a very very good friend of mine…a real-life Varric if i ever met one…gave this to me for my wedding. it was hand-written on the back of a postcard depicting Alfred Hitchcock and his wife/assistant director, Alma Reville.


	4. Spaces

He’s not sure how early, or how late, it is when he wakes to the sensation of Marian’s fingers gripping his wrist.  Her touch is light at first, and soon enough becomes an iron band around his forearm.  Maybe she wants a tumble, or maybe she’s heard bandits shuffling around in the tavern.  Before he opens his eyes, Varric reminds himself that sharing a bed means accepting someone else’s ideas of waking and sleeping and sheet distribution.  With Hawke, there had been no chance to argue for better terms.  She overtook his space with the same entitled grace that followed her like the charm of the ancestors, and he found himself willing to give unprecedented access.  After all, the payoff had been so rich.

But this morning (or midnight) he decides to be annoyed by it.  He cracks an eye to find the lamp still burning on her nightstand, and vellum cascading from her naked chest to the floor.  His gaze tracks from the hand loosely draped over her stomach, where her fingers barely curve toward the monstrous scar, to the shadows of her face in the unsteady light.  All the growling fight in him drains away.  She is sleeping, dreaming some obvious terror, and the cords of her neck jump while her mouth twitches around words Varric can’t understand. 

He lifts a page from her breasts, turning it in the light, and squints to find some signifier to show him where she fell asleep in the story.  _Arishok_. 

“Balls.” He grumbles to himself in the quiet room.  The page sails over edge of the bed and he pinches the bridge of his nose.  Would it have mattered if he’d warned her not to read it, or thought to lock it away?  She could steal the beard off a dwarf’s face. She could certainly ferret out anything he hid from her.  Where Varric is concerned, where his story seems to stitch them together irrevocably, Marian accepts no profound secrecy.  Every lie he offers her, the really good ones that he can be proud of, comes back to him immediately, wrapped in the gilded taunt of her voice.  In many ways they are co-authors, and Maker help him it’s as galling in its complete truth as his willingness to share his space.

Though it guts him to watch her dream of pain because of his words, would she ever know the dark sense of pride it gives him?  It isn’t easy to inspire nightmares with just a few strokes of ink on a page.  Granted, she lived it, so the thing is . . .Hawke isn’t his audience and never will be.

The hand at his wrist squeezes again, and then goes still.  Her brows draw tightly together, and it’s such a poignant mimicry of her waking self that Varric’s heart aches for all the ways he’s let her down.  With his free hand, he tosses the remaining pages onto the floor, shoving them away from her body.  _Worthless nughumper_ , he anoints himself.  But while she sleeps, he can be a hero.  When all the words are safely deposited among the dust and cloying shadows beneath them, Varric moves over her to douse the lamp.  As he does, Marian curls into his chest and molds her body around him where he settles in the downy cradle of the bed. She is a dizzying amount of leg (not that he’d ever complain) and shiny hair smelling of deep mushroom and deathroot.

“What have you been crafting, hmm?”  He asks softly, kissing the top of her head, inhaling the faintest snap of glitterdust.  But her only answer is cold fingertips working through his chest hair, and a pained sigh drifting over his collarbone.  Varric needs her to be okay.  Pulling her tight in the dark, he can feel the dream still quaking under her skin, ripping silent screams from her throat.  Whatever she takes from him, his space or his imperfect lies, he only cares that the story keeps her safe and alive.

The largest scar is hidden now, rolled between them and pressed into the sheets.  So Varric touches places on her body that he knows by heart.  This raised welt on the jut of her shoulder: accidental arrow from the prince of Starkhaven.  A healed-over gouge cutting across two ribs: ogre horn.  The poorly-stitched pucker of skin above one elbow: spider fang (and Merrill had been a perfect stand-in for Anders that day).

Every professional and personal rule of his shatters here, broken open and left inconsequential in the spots where her skin is marred, and Varric can’t remember how that happened.  All he can remember is how she never asks why _this_ part isn’t written anywhere. She never insists that he make himself known beyond this space; where they fall into grunting and sweating, where they fit beyond comprehension, where they claim a pointed bareness and let themselves be happy for a while. 

When had she thrown that particular flask into the middle of his life?  _Bullshit._ If anyone excelled at sabotage, it was him.

Though it’s his bed, and his room, and his story, Varric battles the urge to untangle himself from all of it and flee.  He could easily leave it all to her.  If he runs, it won’t be the first time she wakes to find herself alone in this place.  He supposes it’s no worse than sleeping in the Amell home with only Leandra’s empty space, a solemn little elf, and a couple of dwarves who barely hide their pity.

The champion of Kirkwall cries in her sleep, wetting skin and golden curls of hair.  And that’s not going into any chapter he’ll ever write.  Varric scrapes his nails up under his jaw, and then runs a calloused finger over the curve of her ear to where it’s notched.  That one was the dagger of an angry blood-mage. 

Marian stops dreaming, finally.  His head rolls heavily with sleep, eyes scanning the light under his door before drifting shut.  _Stones, woman.  If I ran, would you even chase me?_


	5. Draft

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How does a writer say the hardest thing?

Certain traps she’s been able to decipher from a very young age.  And for nearly as long, Marian has been constructing her own.  The best traps are the most deceptively simple ones.  Malcolm put these in her path nearly every day, and after the tenth banged knee or the fourteenth sack of oats to the head, she began to see them everywhere.  Her ecstatic young mind began to pick out the natural ones, too.  Marian learned the art of the trap from spiders and fish and dappled, brilliant flowers that ate as hungrily as any predator with fur or fangs. 

So it is with the cunning heart of a trap-maker that the Champion settles herself over the dwarf; watching his eyes change, noting the exhale, waiting for the distraction of rhythm.  Timing is half patience, after all, and she is a woman of profound patience when there are critical things to be rent from flesh and mind.

Varric sighs with no real urgency, leaning into the brace of Marian’s crossed legs at his back.  They fit each other, if not the stone chair exactly, and though he’s the one with strength enough for two, to keep a grip and hold her up, she’s all lithe leverage and leg.  His mouth takes the chill from her breast, drawing heat and teeth over a nipple, and she won’t close her eyes in case he wants to see what comes of it.  They move, not in straight lines but in broken waves between her thighs.  The smile she gives him is true, though.  It warms her to the tips of her toes, and it makes what comes behind it sting like a mouthful of hornets.

“I read your pages,” she starts.  While he’s busy working out which lines she shouldn’t have read, Marian straightens up, slowing over his upward thrust to keep him bare.  “I should say I _found_ your pages.”

It gets his attention.  Unlike the little story he squirreled away, Varric doesn’t hide his realization.  It’s there in the brief widening of those eyes, and how he goes rigid outside of her as well as within.

“Stole, you mean? Clever.  I knew you could do it.” He pulls her flush against his chest and tucks his chin down.  Marian can only see the curve of eyelashes, nose and lips pressed to her ribs, but tremors of disappointment radiate from his grip.  Nothing but implacable kisses issue further from his mouth on her skin, and a stiff heat captured low inside her.  The strength in his hands guides her upward, broad palms spanning hips, and then seats her hard.

“I, oh! I found them.  And I r-read them.” Marian gasps, reaching an arm out to brace against the chair, fingers clawing at dwarven decoration behind Varric’s head.  She would frown if not for how amazing he feels, because as ususal he’s foiling her plan.  Head bowed over golden hair, she squeezes her eyes shut and lifts again, finding his lips on the way down, his tongue licking away the words as if he knew where to find them.  Marian begs herself to forget the pages and let this be enough.  With the moan he doesn’t bother to conceal, given freely to the suck of her mouth, it almost is.  Varric breaks away to reach his voice into her ear, arms keeping her tight against him, and he slows her hips when she tries to jerk them up.

“I’m so good my readers break the law to peek at the next chapter.” He licks the curve, lodging a little wit into her furious flush.  Smiles are forgotten, nerve and blood continuing a different line of questioning.  Marian hugs him closer, using hard shoulders snaked in muscle to urge herself into quicker motion.

When the breath on her collarbone turns harsh, Marian pushes her hand into the thick mass of his hair and tilts his face.

“Why Anders?” She asks.

The dwarf goes still, the scalp under her fingers prickling. But he’s looking at her like he sees some Antivan jungle oddity. And then Varric grins at her, tender fingers touching her neck.

“Your hair is getting so long in the back.” The words and tone match nothing of the challenge in his expression.  Frustration takes her, tightens her knuckles, and Marian yanks his hair tie out.  His head bonks the chair and comes back, heavy locks falling in his eyes as he looks up at her.  “Ow!  Okay.  It’s not a real chapter.  Not one that matters. You know that.”

“I know that.”  Blinking, the champion sorts his lines, the ones she nearly memorized, and reads them back in the hollow of her mind. . . _Anders cups her face gently, stepping close to whisper against her lips,_ _“For three years I have lain awake every night aching for you. . .”_ The whole of it is the usual sort of Tethras story.  And it sounds entertaining enough, until she gets to a certain part. _“He rolls her beneath his weight, thick chest of golden curls brushing her breasts. . .”_

“I’ve written loads of smut.” He waves, shoving a hand through his hair.  He takes her fist, still scrunched at his neck, and draws it down to kiss each knuckle.  “Worse than that.  Or better, depending upon your taste.  It sells. ”

He shrugs.  It’s silent between them.  No squawk of leather or embroidered fancy works its way into the conversation.  They are only flesh cooling on a stone chair, and Varric softens a little inside her as they stare at one another.  Whatever she’s needed from him has never been denied her.  Until now.  Until something he could write, but couldn’t show.  And to that end, he had employed such a transparent proxy. 

Thick fingers glide over her shoulders and the champion closes her eyes, seeing the pages again.  Anders in a sweet fantasy where, at the heart-swelling moment, it isn’t really Anders at all, but someone she knows far better.  Of course he locked it away.  It was never going to fly out of the author’s mouth in a passion, the rogue would never try to steal it from deep in his chest, and if she’d only asked in a thousand other ways, a thousand days before, maybe the pages would never have been written at all.

When she opens her eyes he’s still touching her, hands roving and clear gaze waiting.  Wanting something, she thinks, is never the same as being ready to have it.  A steadying breath fills her as she leans forward to kiss him. "Write me buried between a pirate’s legs. Write me as the sweating contortionist connecting an elf to a mage.”




The hollow of her throat is the perfect echo chamber for the groan escaping him.

“I . . . ah, like you sweating right here.” Varric mouths her neck, biting, lips caught between grinning and kissing. 

“Then why?  Why wear his face?”  She holds him, one hand still pressing her clit while the other cups his sweat slicked neck, pouring herself into his gaze. It doesn’t matter how hurt he looks.  It’s the pleasure of sliding a fingernail into a vague tear, an envelope or a worm-eaten story or any paper of sentimental value, and teasing the hole until the yellowed preciousness of it dusts up and disintegrates.

Varric doesn’t disintegrate, exactly. 

“I’m starting to feel buggered myself.” He half-growls, making to push her off and then seeming unable to do so.  Instead, he slumps against the chair and draws his eyebrows together under the fall of his hair.

“Tell me why you wrote _that_?” She follows him down, forehead coming to rest on his.  Though it’s momentarily subsumed by her need for his voice, the distant pressure of him still moves inside her when she continues softly, “Varric?”

“What you wrote was. . .”  _Cowardly.  Beautiful_. Marian gathers her legs tight around him, fingers worrying whorls of hair on his chest.  But she shakes her head, and they keep moving with his calloused, impatient fingers replacing hers, swirling with surprising lightness over her bud.

“You loved it.” He offers, nodding as he blows the hair away from her face.  Confidence, even a little broken as it is, is a comfort to Marian. 

“It wasn’t Anders.” She breathes against his temple, but he won’t look up at her. It could be that he nods, or maybe he’s just hitching inside her, but she continues.  “It was _your_ hands on me, _your_ voice.” But there’s no voice now.  Quiet meets her with a kiss to her breast, and fingers and cock trapping her in a spindly spark of pleasure.  Marian holds on, legs and heart aching. “ _You_ fucking me.  Telling me th . . .”

Had she thought _him_ the coward? _That you love me_ , bleeds from the breath knocking in her chest _,_ but it gets lost before the rest.“With someone else’s lips.” 

When they lose their words under the dampening fog of need, the room fills with easier sounds; sticky skin that flushes where it hits, stone grinding on the floor, whimpers and moans disguised as careless joys.  Despite the way he makes her want to squeal, Marian finds herself drawing pain down through the muscles of her eyebrows, holding onto grief when her body rebels for its better urges.  She must look frightful, too, because Varric’s arm tightens low across her back.

“Mar-” He starts, worry settling in his jaw.

“And you locked it away.” She cries into his face, losing her voice to a gasp as his thumb grinds her clit.  And she looks down to find his other fingers resting over the scar spanning her stomach.  She shakes her head, blurring the beauty of it, the sting of tears almost as brilliant as the embers coaxed out between her legs.

“What do you want from me?” He slides forward in the chair, dragging her legs away from their leverage, cradling her back.  Because she can’t remember, now, what it was like _not_ to, she gives him all her weight, looping her arms around his neck.

“Oh, no.  That’s my line.”  She laughs, bitterness trudging along inside the sound of it.

The doors are all closed.  Early morning keeps the Man as quiet as they need.  Varric’s room has held their laughter in its craggy walls and shadows.  His bed is stained with ink.  Everything inside this room that isn’t Kirkwall is dwarven relics that have somehow become home.  Marian shakes her head again, unable to look at their owner.

“Do you trust me?” He swallows, blinking back more reflected firelight.  Strength presses into her spine where his fingers lock together.  Marian thinks of Bianca, the sheer weight of such a unique weapon, and flushes to realize how utterly she’s replaced the old girl.  There’s the truth of his pages, beyond any doubt.

Yes, he had needed to write a draft he wasn’t ready to share.  But the way he looks at her now . . .well, it’s as good as published.

“You never wanted me to.” The dullness of her voice astounds her.  But before she can fix it, Varric manages to gather her up enough to move them both to the floor in front of the fire.  For a moment, the room swims backwards, tilts, and Marian finds her back sinking into something soft and dark.  Fur rug.  A gentle, yellow heat touches her cheek, her body, and she doesn’t get a chance to sit up and ask him _when_ he bought a bear-skin rug.  Varric stretches out above her.

“I want you to.” He kisses her chest, her nose. 

She takes his face, tongue meeting his and secreting back into the warmth of his mouth. Once, he had said he was lucky because he had her.  But, being a Hawke, it simply hadn’t occurred to her to consider herself the lucky one.

Varric breaks the kiss and grumbles something under her jaw, shifting his considerable weight lower. It’s so rare to see his hair down, to feel its heft and tickle on her skin.  As he drifts over her, Marian touches it, feeling him press into her hand. There, in the curve of his lip and a crooked nose teasing her skin, is the very thing that helped her through a life that should have killed her.  She’s so quiet that he looks up expectantly, and what the champion sees is Varric’s broad back sloping into iron bands of strength that clap around his arms, eyes that tease and soothe, and an ocean of gilded words growing in a tide to lift her up.

He moves lower still, pausing to kiss her scar, and she drops her cheek to the fur.

“What if I trust you . . . _and_ I love you?”  Beside her nose the scent of ash is light, and there’s not even a pause as he moves her legs apart.  Marian wets her lips, eyes going unfocused in the abstract comfort of the fire.  She clenches her fingers in the thick fur, wondering about the bear it had been before it became this luxuriant thing under her skin. “As it happens, I’ve been doing both for a long time now.”

When she rolls her face to look at him, he’s sitting back on his heels, elbows propped on her knees.  Varric shakes his leonine head, admonishing.  His voice is deep, soft, and it cracks a little when he finally speaks around the incredulous quirk of his mouth.

“You did that on purpose.”  He says, moving his bulk between her thighs.  All that flowing, heavy hair settles over her belly as he bends to kiss her navel, nose teasing hot air where the fire doesn’t. Her eyes catch his, sharing a pair of lifted eyebrows before he ducks lower, speaking between hot kisses. “The official record, of course, will show that I said it first.” 

“Of course.”  She bites her lip, eyes stinging with sooty smoke and delighted tears, when his thumb pulls back the hooded skin over her clit, and an incredible heat suckles at her.  “Because you. . .oh! . . .write the official record.”

“Mhm.” He mumbles, and it’s not a word so much as a definitive pronouncement in a language all their own.


End file.
